The international response to the Haiti earthquake was immediate and illustrates the benefits of the Richter scale. Thanks to the global seismic surveillance systems, geologists could accurately measure the strength of the earthquake: it was a major earth quake of strength 7.0, there was no need for second guessing. A major earthquake in a densely populated area causes huge personal suffering requiring international aid. Without waiting for more detailed analysis, international rescue operations went into action to mitigate hardship.
It is crucial for financial markets to have a similar Richter scale for events in the financial market, because political, economic and other events can trigger seismic shifts that derail the economy. Decision makers have to know about the occurrence of these events as soon as possible. The earlier that people learn about an event and the more precise their knowledge of its nature, the better their reaction. The Scale of Market Quakes (SMQ) service that Olsen Ltd offers for free on the Internet has been designed to fulfill this objective. Users are kindly invited to provide their feedback and suggestions of improvements.
January 14th, 2010 | High frequency finance, News | RSS feed
Here’s my two cents
* SMQ values should be calculated on second-by-second basis if underlying data allows it. Online data feed should be available as well.
* Historical SMQ values should be available in CSV, XML or any other computer-friendly format.
I have deep interest in implemeting quantitative trading model based SMQ indicator, but data is hardly available except for some eye-candy looking charts.
Thank you for your feedback:
* Initially, we have settled on half hourly updates for computational reasons. An online data feed is in development.
* Yes, we agree that it would be great to have historical SMQ values available in a computer-friendly format. We have added your suggestion to the todo list, thank you.
Will it remain free of charge with online data feed available ?
Yes, the data feed is free. As soon as it is ready, I will send you a key to the feed.
I haven’t heard from you since January. Any progress on this matter ?
My apologies. We have created a datafeed, whereby you can collect the SMQ data. I will send you the link in a separate email.
Thanks for the creation and publishing of the SMQ Scale Data.
I took the liberty of writing a blog post about it entitled “Understand the Olsen Scale of Market Quakes”.
The post can be found at:
http://www.youpip.com/2010/05/understand-olsen-scale-of-market-quakes.html
Please send me an e-mail if I missed something or leave a comment if you like it